Cindy Hearts Hugo

Whatever Cindy Sheehan's motivation be for visiting Caracas and hanging out with Hugo Chavez, she needs to be very careful.

Maybe she figures that if you don't like the democratically-elected military dictator you've got, then you need to go looking for a democratically-elected military dictator you like better. The principle is that if you're having trouble with a dog, then you go and find a dog that will eat a dog.

The problem is that people are going to regard forming common cause with a foreign head of state who is also a declared enemy with intense suspicion and hostility. Any effective opposition to the neocon dictatorship has to be home grown.

Cindy Sheehan's behavior and writings reveal her to be a political naif. Her greatest asset is her depth of feeling against the war, as she's experienced that event through the death of her son.

However, before her son Casey was killed she appears to have had no strong feelings about the war one way or the other, and little or no understanding of politics and history. She seems to have trusted the government, and to have drifted along with the tide of history up until the point where it affected her personally.

Those of us who have studied these things in and out of school for any length of time have, according to our political convictions, drawn different sets of inferences from current events, which are really just a continuation of policies that have been in place for decades.

We now see clearly that the Vietnam War was not an anomaly or a "mistake," that the perpetration of foreign wars, whether fought by our own armed forces (Vietnam and Iraq), or by proxy (Central America), or by strategic bombing campaign (Kosovo/Serbia) is a policy dictated by the military-industrial dominance of the American economy and articulated as policy by a federal government which is subservient to it.

The question before candidates is not whether this war is just or unjust. The question is whether war as standard operating procedure will be allowed to continue.

As the writer JoAnn Wypijewski, in an article on the Abu Ghraib trials in this month's (February '06) Harper's concluded, the political task before us is "to set America right again, on course as it was after the Vietnam War, a chastened empire still wielding a fearsome arsenal but with liberal intentions. We have not yet learned to pull up the orchard, to forsake the poisoned ground."

There are at this point no office holders or candidates dedicated to a comprehensive anti-war policy, nor do I see any candidates including Sheehan with anything like a full understanding of these matters.